THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go (10 page)

             
"There were maybe six or seven murders like that, where someone did me wrong and paid for it. I had a high sense of justice--too refined some might say--and there were just too many folks around here who treated me without respect. Then…"

             
He stayed silent so long, remembering, that she cleared her throat and that prompted him.

             
"Then something happened to me. Inside. Here." He lifted his liver-spotted left hand and pointed to his head. "And here." He lay his hand against his heart and sighed audibly. "Maybe it was because I'd killed so many already. Maybe it was because I was hard now and cold and had stopped caring for the value of human life. It might have been because it was so
easy
. People are vulnerable, they don't watch out for themselves. They walk right into the most dangerous situations without proper consideration of the jeopardy.

             
"I've thought on it and am not sure what exactly made me change."

             
He gazed at her, his eyes reflecting bewilderment. He glanced away and leaned forward in the rocker to spit tobacco.

             
"In my thirty-second year of life I killed for the first time without having a grudge against the person. I killed a woman. A
stranger
to these parts, someone passing through."

             
He saw the girl turn aside her head and close her eyes. Yes, he thought, this is the worst. You must be strong to hear this.

             
He continued, his voice removed and unemotional. "I flagged her down that night. I was walking outside of Paul, aimless and restless. I felt this
urge
tearing at me…"

             
It came back to him, that spring night with the crickets chirping in the ditches alongside the road, and the pines swaying and sighing with a sweet gusty little breeze that cooled his face. The blacktop was still warm from a day in the sun and he could feel the heat through the soles of his shoes.

             
He was in a state. He had been walking the floors of his old house in the dark before he felt compelled to leave it. His parents were dead and he was alone, too alone. He was not a good-looking man and women were not attracted to him. He was socially inept and couldn't start up conversations with women. He passed them on the streets in Evergreen when he went shopping there and was mystified at how tongue-tied he found himself.

             
But this night he hadn't started feeling agitated over the lack of female companionship. Something had entered his mind and it wouldn't leave. It was a raging thought process that came from the deep down inside him, not a voice, not some demon or other personality, just his own mind turning on itself and going crazy. Like a snake that swallows its tail, his mind was devouring itself whole.

             
He couldn't sit, couldn't be still. His hands clenched and unclenched as he paced back and forth, back and forth through the darkened rooms. The sound of his footsteps on the bare boards of the floor unnerved him. The breeze blew the window curtains in, billowing them and he swatted at the ghostly whiteness of the muslin as he passed by. He wanted
something
, what did he want? He wanted to be anywhere but here in the old creaking house. He wanted to be anyone but himself. He wanted…

             
He wanted to
kill
someone
.

             
When the realization came, was internally verbalized, he fairly sprinted through the hallway to the porch, leaped to the ground, and headed into Paul. He walked quickly, his breath coming in and out of his lungs, arms swinging to propel him even faster toward his destination. He didn't hate anyone. He didn't despise or fear anyone.

             
But someone must die, Jesus, yes. If he didn't kill he knew he would explode into a million tiny pieces and be absorbed into the universe. If he did not find someone to murder, he would lose his mind, it was as simple as that. There was a
gnawing
going on, as if a hungry rat ate at his brain matter. He felt his control going, dissipating like smoke filtering out through his ears and thinning into the fragrant pine-scented night air. The only way to preserve his sanity was to commit murder.

             
Her car came along slowly, the headlights shining on his back and throwing his tall shadow onto the pavement before him. He turned, stepped into the blacktop's center line, and began waving his arms over his head.

             
She was in a 1950 DeSoto, dirt brown. She pulled over to the side of the road and he came to her side of the car.

             
"What's the matter?"

             
He looked down at her face, a round, bland, doughy face, and he said, "Get out of the car."

             
His voice must have scared her. She drew back and began to put the transmission into first gear.

             
He reached inside the window and turned off the ignition, taking the keys. He punched in the light button and dark swelled around them, wrapping the two of them and the car in an ebony cocoon. "Get out of the car." The rage he felt was a tidal wave rolling over him.

             
He couldn't see right. Her outline blurred for him as she stepped from the DeSoto. The car dimmed into nothingness at her back. He couldn't hear anything, but his own fury screaming KILL, KILL, KILL, setting up a cacophony in his head. She was talking to him, he saw her mouth moving, but she might as well have been talking to a deaf man.

             
He reached out and took her arm, led her behind the car to the grassy embankment and down it into the ditch. He was heading for the woods, knowing even in his frenzy that he should be careful and not do anything out in the open where another car might drive by and its occupant see him.

             
In there, in that midnight wood, he threw her to the ground, straddled her body, and choked her to death. It was over in minutes and as soon as it was, the storm in his mind released him. He hung over her panting, dripping saliva, his heart beginning to slow to a normal pace.

             
This would not be thought accident.

             
And that did not make any difference or deter him for a minute. He would take her body and they would never find it.

             
"So she was the first I killed for no reason that I understood," he said, finishing his tale for the girl and her recorder. "But not the last."

             
"Oh, God."

             
The girl had her face covered with her hands. Hunched over that way she reminded him of a little Raggedy Ann doll, bent into a pretzel shape. "Please don't tell me anymore," she said. "I don't want to hear."

             
"But I have to," he said. "I've begun now and we have to finish it."

             
He looked at the tape through the tiny window of the cassette recorder and said, "It's almost to the end. Why don’t you get another? I have a lot to tell you."

             
While she found another tape in her purse, he thought he should reassure her. He saw how her hands trembled. "I'm not going to do anything to you. I don't want you to be afraid. I'm too old, for one thing, with a bum hand. You could easily free yourself. But that's not why you needn't be scared of me. You see, a few years ago, it stopped."

             
She fumbled with the tape, loaded it, and hit the record button again. Her head came up. "It stopped?"

             
"The urge. It just went away and never returned. I don't know how else to explain it. One day I woke, I'd overslept, it was almost noon, and when I sat up, I knew. It was as clear to me as if an angel had visited the room and spoken through a megaphone in my face. I wouldn't have to kill again. I was free of whatever madness had stalked me all those years of my life. It was like coming up from deep down in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico. I swam into the day and into a newfound life. I felt sorry for the first time. I felt so sorry that despite my jubilation at being loosed from the killing urge, I began to weep. I folded over my legs and I cried like a baby. All those people. Those…corpses…"

             
The girl shuddered. Tears stood in her eyes.

             
"They're behind the house," he said sadly.

             
"Who?" she whispered, horrified.

             
"The ones who weren't accidents. The ones I killed to satisfy the rage."

             
He looked back out across the road to the forest wall. He spied two cardinals in flight, red flashes through the green. "There are plots for them that I couldn't even now lead you to. The woman from the DeSoto is there. She'd be a skeleton, nothing left of her. And there were many others, so…many others. I never counted them,, it wasn't like I was tallying up a score or something. I only know I was on the hunt for years. All my waking hours were spent on the hunt."

             
"For your next victim?"

             
"Yes. When I worked for my paychecks as a foreman at the sewing factory, I was on the hunt. When I shopped for food, I was hunting. When I finally got a car and took little trips into the panhandle of Florida and down to Mobile and up to Montgomery and Huntsville, I was on a hunt.

             
"That's why I was never caught, I suppose. I took them from everywhere and brought them dead back here. Back
there
." He meant the untamed acres behind his house where he had buried the bodies.

             
"Why didn't you turn yourself in when you…when you stopped?" she asked.

             
"I didn't want to go to the electric chair. That should be obvious. What happened to me was something unexplainable, something that I had unearthed by killing with my full faculties, a beast inside me that I called forth through vile hatred. I have lived with my guilt after the day I woke knowing what I was and what I had done. That was not punishment enough, I know. But I was a coward. I knew what death was, I had caused so much of it. I feared my own death, what it held for me. It was not until this last year when I knew I was going to die--my heart is failing--that I've faced it. When I heard of your project I knew I had to tell. There are missing people, families bereaved and wondering where their loved ones disappeared. Now you can let them know. I've put things to rest finally."

             
"Do you know the names of the people you buried in the graves?"

             
"Yes," he said. "I kept their wallets and identification papers." He stood shakily from the rocker, spit tobacco onto the ground, then moved to the screen door. "You won't leave, will you?" he asked, holding the door open and looking at her. "Will you wait here for me to bring it all to you?"

             
She nodded. But he saw something waver in her eyes and suddenly he knew she lied, that she would flee the moment he turned his back.

             
"Why don't you stop the recorder and come with me? It's a large box—a suitcase really-- and I might need help lifting it."

             
He saw how skittish she was and how unhappy at his suggestion. Nevertheless she halted the recorder and stood to follow.

             
He smiled inwardly at the wonder of his persuasion. Hadn't he told her how vulnerable victims were, how they were led into danger without a qualm about their safety? Had she some way missed that warning, deluged as it was with his rambling, detailed confessions?

             
In his bedroom he held onto the polished maple wood bedpost to lower himself to his old knees. He reached under the bed frame into the dusty gloom there and pulled out a metal suitcase, an old tin contraption he had kept from the forties. It was scratched and dented and even the handle was missing. He struggled back to his feet.

             
"Could you lift it to the bed?"

             
He stepped away so that she could get a grip on the old suitcase. As she stooped, slipping her fingers beneath the heavy case, his good left hand felt along the dresser near him for the silver-plated letter opener he had bought in Evergreen one Christmas more than twenty years ago.

             
Just as the girl lifted, using her back, grunting, he closed his fist around the stiletto-sharp opener and plunged it with his remaining strength down into her back.

             
She screamed, dropping the suitcase with a clatter. She fell onto the quilt-covered bed and the springs creaked in accompaniment. Her hands came behind her feeling for the object sticking in her back.

             
He sat down on the bed to wait.

             
He talked to her as she died.